


Forewarned

by shotboxer



Category: Primeval
Genre: Blood and Gore, Dark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-01
Updated: 2016-11-01
Packaged: 2018-08-28 11:51:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8444731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shotboxer/pseuds/shotboxer
Summary: Connor Temple is used to seeing ghosts . . .





	

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I do not own Primeval, its characters or anything else associated with it. I am making no money from this.

Connor Temple was used to seeing ghosts.  He got the usual of course - murder, suicide, tragic accident - but mostly he got the ones who wanted to chat.  Which was fine.  Some of them had great senses of humor.  He didn’t make the mistake of thinking that they were trapped here until he passed on some message for them.  They weren’t mere remnants of the departed either.  It was more complicated than that.  Connor had stopped trying to figure it out after he’d gone through that one binge dive into metaphysics and eschatology and some really creepy areas of the dark web when he was eleven.  He was happy to take each spirit as it came.  He always enjoyed having a nice cup of tea and a chat with Gran Tallmage who’d died well before he was born each November 3rd.  Gran liked to show up just a little late so she could make a grander entrance.

Connor was used to seeing more people slipping through the crowds, brushing by unnoticed by everyone around them, except for Connor, of course.  Sometimes he even got a wink or a wave.  Obviously there were more to see on Halloween and the days surrounding it.  Connor always enjoyed that time.  Maybe it was because his birthday began the season on the 29th, maybe it was all the extra dead milling around making him a bit giddy, maybe it was all the candy.  It could be the excuse to don a cool costume.  Students never needed but the barest excuse to host a fancy dress party after all.  Could be it was just that he liked the autumn.  Connor was used to seeing ghosts.  Until the first October after the Anomaly Project had begun with a shimmer and a scutosaurus in the Forest of Dean and the ghost he saw was his own.

 

The first Connor was wearing a coat soaked in blood from the wrists down, sodden and dripping on the floor.  Behind him were crowded others.  Bullet holes through their temples.  Gaping holes in the backs of their heads.  Faces blue and twisted, froth dribbling down their chins.  Skin stretched and bloated with water.  He knew them all and he knew what day they were from. 

“Stephen?  Did they get the venom in time?”  He had to ask. 

The ghosts laid their hands on his shoulder, squeezed and faded away.

The next day Connor woke to find himself standing at the foot of the bed, perforated with large teeth marks, dripping water. 

“Abby?” he asked. 

The ghost shimmered away.

The next ghost was waiting for him that night when he finished zipping up and turned to face the back entrance to the pub.  Its intestines peaked out from the edges of the jagged gouge where the giant beak had penetrated.  Connor supposed it’d been the crack to the head that had snapped his neck that’d actually killed him that time. 

“Rex?” Connor asked.

The ghost walked through him, dissipating into mist as he turned to follow its progress.

 

That year, when his Gran came for her chat, Connor couldn’t taste his tea.

 

For a time, at least, the return of Helen Cutter and the future predators drove all thoughts of the ghosts from Connor’s mind.  He was too busy waiting to see who her mechanizations would get killed this time.  If he caught a glimpse of another him, savaged by rending claws and teeth, lying limply among the trees, he had no time to have a closer look.  Not after Cutter had stumbled back through the anomaly with his wife sashaying along behind him and they’d found out that a whole contingent of Special Forces soldiers were dead and that Helen had slept with Stephen when he was her student.

 

The glimpses kept coming though.

 

In the shopping center, in a dark corner, throat worried to bloody shreds by tiny raptor teeth.

“The cleaner?”  Bits of torn skin flapped as the corpse shook its head.

In the undergrowth, skull pierced by giant, curved teeth while Abby walked ahead, gun in hand.

“Anyone else?”  The body closed its eyes and turned its face away.    

The stump of a leg, bone shards splintering the flesh, lying in a pool of gore under the ADD.  Connor knew without looking that there was only enough there to make up one body.

“He got himself out.”    

 

One after the other, in the long days it took Stephen to get out of hospital and then rehab and rejoin the team. 

Hands blackened and smoking, body rigid. 

Shredded to bits in different ways.  Sometimes his face was still there.  Sometimes the only way to tell it was him was a scrap of cloth. 

Connor kept his mouth shut and watched the parade. 

 

On that first night they were all back together at the British Museum, he was there yet again.  Lower half bitten away, tucked up against the sun cage while Abby and Sarah laughed about a non-existent curse where they thought he couldn’t hear them and Cutter and Stephen compared notes on his other side, oblivious to his shaking. 

 

When they were all back at the ARC, while Stephen flirted with Sarah and Cutter demanded she be given a job, enthusing about beasts of legend, Connor made his way to a quiet office and wrote out a list.

 

 

The next day, Connor Temple’s resignation was found taped to the front of the ADD.  All his things had been removed from Abby’s flat.  His mobile number was no longer in service.

 

 

In a small roadside pub in the Forest of Dean, Connor sat in a back corner and sipped his tea, rucksack at his feet.  What better way to make an entrance than to arrive early after an after-lifetime of being late?  It could be her birthday present to him.  The chink of cup on saucer sounded to his left.  “Hiya, Granny.  Thanks for changin’ things up a bit.  I’ve a favor to ask of you, ‘bout contacting some of these others I’ve been seein.’  There’s a man called Nick Cutter they all need to have a few words with . . .”


End file.
